Data Center Advisors

So in the last installment I mentioned that we had real customers using our offerings both for enterprise 2.0 and for web 2.0. Well now that the following link you can see that the United States National Archives uses HCAP as well for an internal deployment that is really Enterprise 2.0 in nature.  Again I challenge EMC to produce AtMos(t) one customer.  I won’t go into too many details due to the nature of the site, I will tell you that EMC’s content management product is one of the offerings that made it into the mix, as per the article.  There is of course more software in the mix, so EMC doesn’t have a monopoly.

Here’s the relevant part from the article:

“To that end, the system is a mix of off-the-shelf and custom-built components, based on a service-oriented architecture and incorporating Oracle Corp.’s database technology, EMC Corp.’s Documentum for records management, search technology and a Web-based front end. It also incorporates a hierarchical storage system from Hitachi Ltd. that blends servers from EMC, Hitachi and Sun, as well as the Hitachi Content Archive Platform, which automatically indexes records as they enter the system, enabling immediate search capability.”

P.S. There are of course other customers notably in Asia using the technologies within HCAP to create a geographically disperse “cloud” to manage, store and maintain unstructured content. This is not merely an archive that is the recycle bin without the recycle button, instead the content within is actively managed and repurposed.

P.P.S.  I agree with Tony on his point about Centera.  I think that EMC’s customers should be looking at AtMos(t) as the long term replacement for Centera because it is obvious to me EMC is divesting themselves of the human capital needed to keep Centera innovative.  EMC’s apparent disinterest in Centera and their customers skepticism on the offering lead them to really kick the tires on HCAP and it shines to their scrutiny.

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Posted in Customer Focus, File and Content Management 6 Comments »

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Michael,

Interesting take on Atmos but I think you’re a bit off in your determinations that Atmos is the long term replacement for Centera. I’ll let Stephen Todd handle the Centera argument but, based on my knowledge of Atmos and its positioning within the greater cloud complex of storage and service, they couldn’t be more distant in approach.

Atmos was designed from the ground up to work within the cloud infrastructure, with particular attention paid to SOAP/REST integration to allow “control” (implied loosely) of the Atmos policy/storage/meta-data engine to meet customer objects for data management. Notice, I didn’t say storage…Atmos isn’t a storage product; it’s software that can be layered on top of pretty much any particular bit of hardware out there. For density purposes, some of the early SKUs will utilize the “Hulk” style storage hardware, but there is no real limit to what Atmos can attach to or store on (caveat: there are thousands of iterations of storage out there and obviously, EMC does reserve the right to not test against all of them. ) To that end, Atmos is decidedly different from Centera as it’s not a storage node based architecture. Additional features that differ between the two are the use of XAM (Centera), object/meta-data implications, per-object policy management (Atmos), tiered storage (Atmos can use SAS or SATA; Centera is SATA only), drive spin down (Atmos), etc. etc. Additionally, Atmos is not archive software; it’s active content management driven by Web 2.0 or cloud applications.

Hopefully that clears up a few issues that you present. If you want to learn more, check out my blog (Flickerdown.com or Stephen Todd’s blog).

thanks!

Dave Graham

Dave, yes we have similar lines of thinking with HCAP. It is really more than just a spinning disk platform, basically it is more like a traditional 3 tier application model, but all built into one consolidated software stack. Our configurations are both RAIN and SAIN based (the last one is a pun) and deployed in both configurations at our customer sites. NARA is deployed on a USP-V infrastructure mostly because they wanted the ability to perform high performance array retirement. Whereas another customer we have is deployed on their own whitebox servers which we test for them.

I would argue that while it may not be classical storage it is a rethink of what access methodologies and approaches to keeping digital unstructured content. While many companies have been pushing SOAP and REST both (as well as some of the other early concepts like XML-RPC) I really credit Amazon with pushing REST and achieving some success with it for Internet based object persistence.

I appreciate your comment, and I will check out both you and Stephen’s blog. Please don’t take the tone of my blog the wrong way. I honestly respect EMC, but you are our competitor so… On this Thanksgiving day, I guess this is another thing to be thankful for your well written and considerate comment.

Michael,

yup, we’re competitors and in that spirit, any good post from a competitor always merits my attention. (Not to finger point but NetApp doesn’t really reach that criteria very often. )

you may be interested in referencing this little mind map i tossed together regarding Cloud Optimized Storage.
http://share.xmind.net/dave_graham/cloud-optimized-storage-2/

in that diagram, I’m laying out the foundational components from a hardware/software driven perspective of a cloud storage model. i’d appreciate your feedback on it as well as this is NOT an EMC-specific model.

cheers,

Dave

Understood, I’ll do that in a future post. I’m actually going to start looking at the merger between search technologies and social networking software in my next post. Of course Google’s recent “SearchWiki” effort will be discussed, but they weren’t the first, as far as I can tell that goes to search.wikia.com.

Cheers from Japan, and I honestly hope that you have had a good Thanksgiving!

Michael

Michael,

looking forward to your upcoming article.

cheers,

Dave

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